"When a man's frauds have been enormous there is a certain safety in their very diversity and proportions."

_____________ 

I first posted this on trueblueliberal.org on August 17, 2016 when Donald Trump's chances of a first term still seemed remote (terrifying, but remote). With four days until the election that could give him a second term -- and after all the intervening years with all the new crimes, lies, and misdemeanors from Trump and the #TrumpCrimeFamily -- I still think it's the most important thing that has appeared on this blog about that man. This post explains why vague insinuations about "Hillary Clinton's Emails!" in 2016 or "Hunter Biden's Laptop!" in 2020 can get more media coverage than Trump's sexual assaults and payoffs to porn stars, or his missing tax returns, or the fact that he kowtows to authoritarians like Putin and Erdogan and Kim, or that the First Couple of Nepotism are making millions while working in the White House, or that his last three campaign managers have been arrested, or that he calls Nazis "very fine people," or his impeachment less than a year ago, or..., well, you get the picture. There are too many scandals for any one person to keep up with, which turns out to be his best defense.

So here's the 2016 post again, without further changes.

_____________

At this point, about two thirds through Trollope's The Way We Live Now, shadowy London financier August Melmotte is making his first foray into the political world, running for Parliament and finding out that one of his recent shady real-estate transactions might be exposed publicly right after he had hosted a dinner in his home for the Emperor of China attended by the great men of England and Europe.

My current pleasure reading takes a political turn.

...I think he took some pride in his own confidence as to his own courage, as he stood there turning it all over in his mind. Very much might be suspected. Something might be found out. But the task of unravelling it all would not be easy. It is the small vermin and the little birds that are trapped at once. But wolves and vultures can fight hard before they are caught. With the means which would still be at his command, let the worst come to the worst, he could make a strong fight. When a man's frauds have been enormous there is a certain safety in their very diversity and proportions. Might it not be that the fact that these great ones of the earth had been his guests should speak in his favour? A man who had in very truth had the real Brother of the Sun dining at his table could hardly be sent into the dock and then sent out of it like a common felon. (page 472 of Penguin Classics paperback)

With legal cases about Trump's so-called "University" still pending, his complicated tax returns still unreleased, a history of bankruptcies, thousands of "minor" lawsuits, and more, the "diversity and proportion" of Trump's financial shenanigans put August Melmotte's to shame (though Melmotte did it from nothing without being given a head start by his father). If we do see any of Donald Trump's tax returns before November 8 (unlikely at this point as he continues to thumb his nose at the voters and the media), the chances are that, unless he gave nothing to charity or paid no taxes, the rule-bending in those thousands of pages would be so financially arcane that it would take teams of forensic accountants to root it out and another team to try to reduce it to layman's terms. It's only "the small vermin and little birds that are trapped at once."

If I entertained any notion that Donald Trump might have the attention span to tackle it, I might think that he had modeled parts of his life on The Way We Live Now.

Has the True Blue Liberal blog's raison d'être been resurrected?

Yesterday I posted here for the first time in a while. With war drums beating again and one of America's most prominent war drummers, John Bolton, again in a position of power, it seemed necessary.

Today I went back and looked at one of the earliest posts on this blog from December 2004, while we were still dealing with the trauma of George W. Bush's re-election and I felt the need to jump into the leading social media of the time. I titled the post "Peace Bloggers." It had occurred to me when I decided to start a blog of my own to look up "Weblog" on Wikipedia. That article placed a lot of emphasis on the role of organized "War Bloggers" in the run-up to the Bush/Cheney war on Iraq as a key factor in the history of blogging (the current Wikipedia entry no longer even mentions "War Blogging"). So I proudly proclaimed that this little corner of the web would be a place for peace blogging, and that's why it's time for me to become more active again. If Trump thinks that war on Iran (or Venezuela or wherever) could help his popularity in the run-up to next year's election, does anyone believe that he would restrain the most hawkish of his advisors? Can some of us help to make war unpopular? Isn't it worth trying?

trump•er•y - The TBL Word of the Day

Occasionally on Twitter I'll include definitions of words that are appropriate for the news of the day, such as this tweet from this morning related to the word trumpery:

If you were a novelist & named your joke presidential candidate "Trump", critics would skewer your heavy-handedness. pic.twitter.com/Hg7wb0HMXE

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) March 3, 2016

Sometimes the words are less related to the news and simply a product of my love of dictionaries, but I like the idea of adding a TrueBlueLiberal word of the day on this blog (if only to keep me dedicated to updating this page more regularly). We'll see how long it lasts.

Meanwhile, please try to use today's word in a sentence.


[The dictionary entry photographed above is from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, 1987, page 2030.]

This is the purpose for which I started TrueBlueLiberal.org in 2004...

...so I take complete credit for this significant rehabilitation of the word 'liberal'!

Proportion of Dem caucus-goers and voters identifying as "liberal":

IA
2008: 54%
2016: 68%

NH
2008: 56%
2016: 68%

NV
2008: 45%
2016: 70%

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) February 22, 2016

The TBL Sidebar Poll Is Showing a Trend

I expected that the supporters of Bernie Sanders might make a good showing when I put up my first 2016 Presidential Poll in the sidebar, but I wasn't expecting him to open up a quick 80% gap over Hillary Clinton.

Does anyone see any excitement for the "inevitable" establishment candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination?

(NOTE: If you're looking at trueblueliberal.org on a mobile device, you'll need to scroll down and click on "View Web Version" if you want to see and vote in the sidebar poll.)

The 2015 True Blue Liberal Blue Ribbon Award : First Call for Nominations

Also available for 49 other states.

If Oscar Sunday tells us anything, it tells us that nothing -- absolutely nothing -- is more important in our compulsively competitive culture than winning awards. So, finally, after more than a decade of preparation, we are ready to finally use our blogging expertise to award one blog the very first True Blue Liberal Blue Ribbon Award in 2015. In addition to the honor of being chosen and a blue ribbon graphic to place prominently (or secretly, or not at all) on one's blog, the winner will also win a pair of mugs, one honoring their home (or favorite) state, and one featuring our entire liberal blue nation.

One of the actual physical prizes.

The process of choosing this year's winner will last until December, with a chance for readers to comment and vote on long and short lists of candidates, but this is the very first call for blog nominations. Add a comment with a URL here on this blog post at TrueBlueLiberal.org or tweet a suggested blog address (your own or someone else's) to @TrueBlueLiberal on Twitter.

There is no need for any information about a blogger's real name or address until a the grand-prize winner wants to claim her or his prizes. I'm going into this process without preconceptions and looking forward to being surprised by a number of bloggers who are presenting unique valuable thoughts in a variety of new ways. 

TrueBlueLiberal.org turns ten years old today.

Started with its first post on December 16, 2004, in the dark days between the second election of Bush and Cheney (their first without the assistance of an antiquated electoral college, hanging chads, and a reactionary Supreme Court) and their second inauguration, this blog enters its double digits today much as it began, not with a bang but a whimper.

One of these days I'll need to start taking this blog seriously. Maybe I'll start giving out True Blue Liberal Blue Ribbons to other neglected blogs in 2015. Americans love awards.

The Smashwords Independent Author Manifesto

Smashwords founder Mark Coker just published a ten-point "Indie Author Manifesto" on his blog yesterday:

"Where once self publishing was viewed as the option of last resort - the option for failed writers and an option marked by stigma and shame - self publishing is increasingly viewed as the option of first choice for many writers.  Over the next couple years I think we'll reach a point where more first-time writers aspire to indie-publish than traditionally publish.  Indie authors are the cool kids club."

As one of those newly independent novelists, please forgive me for plugging (I mean "marketing") my brand-new addition to the glut (I mean "phenomenon"):

Fire Answers Fire at Amazon  
at Apple iTunes
at Barnes & Noble
at Flipkart (India)
at Scribd.
at Smashwords
The Fire Answers Fire page on Goodreads

Our raison d'être justified: Self Identification as "Liberal" Hits New High.

When TrueBlueLiberal.org was started right after John Kerry's defeat in November 2004, a large part of my initial impetus for doing so was to show some pride and restore some luster to a word the conservative government and press had hurled as an insult and which liberals themselves (like the cowardly Kerry) and all establishment Democrats had run away from. Who? Me? Liberal?


Fuck yeah I'm a liberal. It may not have been much of a rallying cry or a blog's raison d'être, but it was mine.

According to this Gallup Poll today, in 2013 "liberal identification edged up to its highest level since Gallup began regularly measuring ideology in the current format in 1992." 23% of all Americans describe themselves as liberal (up from 19% in 2004), but among Democrats the rise was more dramatic, from 33% to 43% in the decade we've been beating the True Blue Liberal drum. Don't be fooled by the fact that less than a hundred people visit this blog on a normal day. Our influence is obviously enormous.

You're welcome.

Without a Mention in a Times Article, Did the WHIG Really Exist?

I hadn't written anything on the WHIGgate Update blog since 2009, but on this tenth anniversary of Bush'n'Cheney's Shock'n'Awe show over Baghdad, I had to go back there and repeat one of my routine searches to see if The New York Times -- the "Paper of Record" -- had yet made one reference in its news pages to the WHIG, the White House Iraq Group.  

You can look at earlier entries on that blog from 2005-2009 to see more about this key group whose sole purpose was to sell us this illegal criminal invasion of Iraq (the obvious reason why would-be war criminals of BushCheneyCo rejected the authority of the International Criminal Court in 2002), but the Times still has NO news articles about this group whose existence has been widely reported in The Washington Post (though I'm having trouble today finding a live link to the key Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus article in the August 10, 2003 Post), by Bill Moyers, in The Huffington Post, The Daily News, and elsewhere, and publicly confirmed in print and video by key players like Scott McClellan.  But still, all the Times has to show when you search for existence of this group in its pages are a handful of Op/Ed pieces written (and written well) by Frank Rich.
This would all be just a strange omission in the journalistic record of this disastrous war if the Times' Judith Miller hadn't played a key role in spinning the WHIG's web of lies with her reporting about the aluminum tubes that were supposedly being used by Saddam Hussein to enrich uranium. Dick Cheney could then conveniently point to this reporting in "the liberal press" to help make his fictional case for war (with that glee about others' death and destruction which only the true chickenhawks among us can feel).
The Times at some point will need to come to terms with its own culpability in beating the war drums, but I'm no longer holding my breath.

(Crossposted from WHIGgate Update)

How to Write a Right-Wing Blog Post.

How hard is it to be a right-wing blogger these days? I can write one of their posts for them.
How dare the President of the United States waste his time having an obvious ball hanging out with Mick Jagger, B.B. King, Trombone Shorty, Warren Haynes, Booker T Jones, Jeff Beck and friends singing "Sweet Home Chicago"?

If the President of the United States is to sing in public, it should not be a song first recorded by a man who famously sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in Rosedale, Mississippi. Has this been reported with an appropriate amount of bile by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News yet? What's taking them so long? Were they watching the Daytona 500 last night rather than PBS's presentation of "Red, White and Blues" from the White House?
If the President of the United States must sing (and he really shouldn't), then it should not be a song by Al Green or Robert Johnson. It should be Francis Scott Key's "Star-Spangled Banner" (with his/her hand glued to his/her heart), or Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," or Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful":

It's even better if it's sung off key like a real American (and like everything else that comes out of Mitt Romney's mouth).


--------------
(It's not too late for GOPper BLOGgers [or music lovers] to watch the entire "In Performance At the White House" here if they need to acquire more evidence to discredit our singing President.)

The Visual State of True Blue Liberal dot Org on 19 Oct 2011

Anyone looking at the timeline in the right sidebar can tell at a glance that this blog has gone through long periods of inactivity since I started it in late 2004. For some reason I've been more active this month than I have been in a long time, so I felt a need to take stock. Here (courtesy of the great little tool at Wordle.com that I've used a few times before) is the current state of TrueBlueLiberal dot org at 9:30 am on 19 October 2011.

I love some of the random juxtapositions of words, especially "Huxley's Vehemently Government Abortion Sing-A-Long" down in the lower left. I was surprised to see WAR get the prominent primary position on this cloud, but I'm glad it did. We need to remember every day that we are a nation at war. I think the rest of the world remembers it far better than we Americans do.

October 7, 2001 -- October 7, 2011 (and not over yet)

In an alternate universe, there is actually a recognition that today is the tenth anniversary of the start of our longest war.
However, in the military states of the USA, I guess it just seems normal to most of us to be a nation at constant war. I'm home today, and I'm flipping randomly through television news channels and there is no mention of Afghanistan that I've seen. There is more concern with Michael Jackson's doctor, the 2012 political horse race, Amanda Knox, a missing baby in Missouri ... the news channels might as well be the soma of Huxley's Brave New World, helping us to forget that we responded to criminal religious fanatics with daisy cutter bombs and met one day of extreme violence in the US with ten years of war (and counting) around the world.
I was at a loss on how to respond to today's significance and our collective amnesia, so I dug back into this blog and found one of my very first entries -- almost a mission statement. It doesn't go all the way back to October 2001. But even in December 2004, I was afraid that the MYTH of universal consent to the Afghan war was already being written by the powers that be and their corporate media:

Friday, December 17, 2004
Peace bloggers
It occurred to me as I started this process to look up Weblog on Wikipedia. I didn't realize how recent the history was, with the first use of the word Weblog only dating from the end of 1997 and Blog from 1999. So, even starting this blog at this relatively late date (16 Dec 04) might seem early in some later blogger's eyes. The Wikipedia article is also interesting in the role it gives to the "war bloggers" supporting the Iraq fiasco in 2002.

I don't want to leave any doubt that this will be a place for peace blogging. I was working in Manhattan on 11 Sept 2001 and not only was I out marching against the criminal invasion of Iraq on the streets of New York before and after the war started, but I still believe that Osama bin Laden would be in custody if we had NOT invaded Afghanistan -- if we had instead brought continued international pressure on the Taliban government, which showed some desire to bargain for its survival. War is NEVER the right answer to any problem, and we've started two of them (and the phantom fictional "war" on terror) in this first Bush/Cheney administration. AND WE RE-ELECTED THEM???!!! That's the real reason I felt the need to jump into this messy and overpopulated blog fray. Because the thing I truly thought was impossible, the fact that the American voters gave a vote of confidence to these criminals, has come to pass.

While it's irresistible to be vehemently Anti-Bush, it's not enough, we have to NOW start defining ourselves by our labels, rather than letting THEM use our words as a wedge issue to divide us. We are liberals and we're proud of all that stands for. They're conservatives, and they want to destroy the UN, Social Security, and every trace of FDR's fingerprints on this country & world. We can't let it happen.

- True Blue Liberal

Social Notworking

There are a lot of Facebook pages visible on screens around my office this week, and not just among twenty somethings. There are pictures of Christmas puddings and snow drifts that just MUST be shared with all of one's "friends". I've avoided the Facebook so far only because they ask you to register your name when you're sent a link of someone's vacation snaps (and there are "friends" and relatives there to whom I'd prefer to remain invisible).


While looking for uses of the term "Social Notworking" just now, I stumbled on a British blog dedicated to the fad, "Social Notworking: Tired of the social networking malarkey?" at www.socialnotworking.co.uk. They have to be given special compliments for posting a couple of entries in 2007 and then losing interest in this stupid blogging fad as well.

I'm making "Social Notworking" my phrase for the fin de l'année, with the hope that looking at family slide shows online hasn't been replaced by something even more stupid by the end of twenty eleven. I still don't understand why the Facebook didn't die on the day that the first student was "friended" by a parent, but I think it's just an age thing. I don't know why college students of the 21st century call their parents on the phone either.

Happy New Year.

Who knew that Sarah Palin was one of us?

Should we send her a True Blue Alaska Liberal mug and button, or lift a toast of commie vodka in her honor now that a blogger for a New Jersey newspaper that hasn't totally gone out of business yet has written a piece titled "Sarah Palin: Just another whiny liberal claiming victimization"?
Of course this writer, this Paul Mulshine fella -- "the sole genuinely conservative columnist on any major American newspaper" in his own words -- doesn't seem to admit that most of the whining and whinging (I love the Brit version, which seems more onomatopoeically correct) has been pouring from people on the right claiming victimization by godless public schools, the IRS, non-whites & have-nots, ObamaPelosi&Reid, the mean liberals who call the teabaggers on their racism, and the gays & lesbians who are attacking their holy unhappy marriages (and the Newark Star Ledger is a "major American newspaper"?).
The fine White Whine of victimization has become the background noise of our culture, but it's so much easier to take one of Sarah Palin's most common and unattractive features and attribute it -- without any evidence of any liberal feelings or thoughts on her part -- to her "liberalism". And, as we know from Glen Beck, Liberal = Communism = Fascism = Nazism. The conservatives have learned that their second greatest weapon (after an unrelenting appeal to irrational fears of those feeling victimized) is to treat words as if they have no meaning grounded in facts or history. After the success of the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry and the WMD lies of the Bush Regime, they've obviously come to the conclusion that the most effective way to win any argument is to simply destroy the meaning of our common language.

Taking the Joke Too Far.

I have to stop looking around the darker corners of the Twitter and the blogosphere.

When a blog has to run a sidebar disclaimer reading ...

• Legal Notice

  This blog does not promote, support, condone, encourage, advocate, nor in any way endorses [sic] any racist ideologies, nor any armed and/or violent revolutionary, seditionist,[sic] criminal, and/or terrorist activities!!! The author of this blog assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained in this blog!!! This blog is for information and entertainment purposes only!!![sick]
  

... and places that disclaimer to the right of incoherent obscenity-laced racist rants and immediately below links to white supremacist websites and a sidebar advertisement for a t-shirt bearing a parody of Shepard Fairey's iconic Barack Obama 'HOPE' poster with the President's head tilted to the side, his eyes closed, and a noose around his neck above the word 'ROPE', and takes the nom de blog et twitter of "Obama is a Monkey," has the joke gone further than a mere parody of right-wing imbecility?

Because it has to be a joke, doesn't it?

Just asking. And hoping.

The Visual State of the Blog on the Fifth of January Twenty Ten

This representation of the current content on TrueBlueLiberal.org was created at http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed by a Creative Commons license.

Try it for your own site. It's fun, and I've discovered that I need to use a slightly less pedestrian vocabulary.

Comedy Writers Take Note.

If you're looking to imitate a freelance conservative commentator on your own comedy website, you can't do better than the comedy writers behind the site that I just stumbled upon this afternoon: http://www.us4freespeech.com/. Here are a couple of randomly-selected run-on sentences from the center of their long Christmas Eve entry.

"[...] REMEMBER: MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING = CO2 REGULATION = CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION = OBAMA, AL GORE, CHAVEZ, MUGABI, BARBRA BOXER, THE EPA AND ANY OTHER LIAR, BECOMING THE LAUGHING STOCK OF THE WORLD! GLOBAL WARMING PREVENTION, CARBON DIOXIDE REDUCTION, CO2 EMISSION CONTROL REGULATION ALL HARMLESS TITLES REQUIRING THE EPA, FORCED BY THE UNDOCUMENTED CONSTITUTIONAL THREAT TO AMERICA OBAMA, TO KILL AMERICAN TAX PAYERS BY MEANS OF ANNUALLY GENERATING FALSE REPORTS OF ELEVATED NATIONAL CO2 LEVELS REQUIRING A REDUCTION PERIOD EVENTUALLY BECOMMING A LAW. EXCITING! DURING THESE REDUCTION OR CLEAN PERIODS, AMERICANS WILL BEGIN TO DISAPPEAR WHILE THE FAKE NEWS STATE CONTROLLED MEDIA REPORTS IRONICALY HOW KIDNAPPING IS ON THE RISE, WHEN ACTUALLY IT WILL BE OBAMAS FUTURISTIC RED/GREEN "NEW NATIONAL ARMY" COMMITTING MURDER. THE DEMOCRATS WILL NOT ALLOW ANY INVESTIGATION OF THE FALSE ELEVATED NATIONAL CO2 DATA FOR FEAR OF THE TRUTH BEING TOLD ONCE AGAIN LEADING TO THE DEMOCRATS BEING EXPOSED AS THE RACIST ROBERT BYRD KKK PARTY SEEKING TO DOMINATE THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE. EXTRAVOGANT WORDS TWISTED AROUND MEANINGLESS LANDSCAPES OF HARMONY AL GORES POEM REFERS TO PREACHERS BEING MURDERED AND HORSEMAN RIDING.[...]"

Don't hurt your brain trying to make logical sense of it. Simply admire the flow, the unrelenting unreadable BOLD ARIAL CAPS, the exclamation points, the creative spelling. Priceless. It's right up there with the comedy writers behind @SarahPalinUSA who celebrated Christmas Eve with the following joke posting. Note how brevity and random capitalization and punctuation can be used just as efficiently as screaming run-on caps when imitating the comic reactionary voice. A freedom from standard orthographical rules is mandatory though.


~~~~~~~~~~~~
(And for those of you who may be reading this on a device that doesn't show images, the text of "Sarah Palin's" Tweet reads: "c tomrrw's Healthcare Takeover vote=the sleeping giant will awaken&action will b takn by"average"Americans as lite shines on big govt growth")

Two Departures

1) It seems that the death of free broadcast television was not exaggerated. On June 12 when my seven fuzzy analog signals ended and I turned on my digital converter, I did get ABC on channel 7.1, paid infomercials on 7.2, and a weather crawl on 7.3. I don't get any of them anymore, though a burst of colored pixels and the occasional sound will sometimes pop up in lieu of the "No Signal" screen for a few minutes on one of those channels. Tonight, instead of watching what Disney has cooked up for me, I'll watch one of the DVDs that I took from the Free Public Library this afternoon on my computer: It Happened One Night with Gable and Colbert (not that Colbert), Girl on the Bridge with Auteuil and Paradis, or Season Five of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Does anyone even need TV? Really, now that Walter Cronkite's dead, what's the point?
2) The domain name of WHIGGATE.org is dead too. It wasn't worth paying the annual fee to keep the name alive for the WHIGGATE UPDATE blog at whiggate.blogspot.com. If Americans didn't care about the lies that led us to invade Iraq while the liars were still in power, why should they care now? And President Obama's right; it's more important for us to look at our future challenges than our past crimes and errors. So let's just ignore the members of the White House Iraq Group and thank their mythical god that they will spend the rest of their lives believing in a universe where an eternity in hell is a possibility.

I hope the new design attracts scores of new visitors

Well, "scores" is probably optimistic.
Maybe "dozens" is more realistic.
I'd hope for at least a dizaine of new visitors after taking the afternoon to brighten up a design that had been done all in black since it was created in the dark days of early November 2004 when we had lost all hope in the American electorate and the motto at the head of this new blog was "helping save america from the dark side, one state at a time." And what was going to save those deep red states in the thrall of torturers? Why, t-shirts of course! You laugh. But who's our President now?

Maybe the new page design will even prompt me to write here on a more regular basis. Or maybe not.